Wendy Hui Kyong Chun

The Enduring Ephemeral, or the Future Is a Memory

New media, like the computer technology on which it relies, races simultaneously towards the future and the past, towards what we might call the bleeding edge of obsolescence. Indeed, rather than asking, What is new media? we might want to ask what seem to be the more important questions: what was new media? and what will it be? To some extent the phenomenon stems from the modifier new: to call something new is to ensure that it will one day be old. The slipperiness of new media—the difficulty of engaging it in the present—is also linked to the speed of its dissemination. Neither the aging nor the speed of the digital, however, explains how or why it has become the new or why the yesterday and tomorrow of new media are often the same thing. Consider concepts such as social networking (MUDS to Second Life), or hot YouTube videos that are already old and old email messages forever circulated and rediscovered as new. This constant repetition, tied to an inhumanly precise and unrelenting clock, points to a factor more important than speed—a nonsimultaneousness of the new, which I argue sustains new media as such. Also key to the newness of the digital is a conflation of memory and storage that both underlies and undermines digital media’s archival promise. Memory, with its constant degeneration, does not equal storage; although artificial memory has historically combined the transitory with the permanent, the passing with the stable, digital media complicates this relationship by making the permanent into an enduring ephemeral, creating unforeseen degenerative links between humans and machines. As I explain in more detail later, this conflation of memory with storage is not due to

Working the Digital Humanities: Uncovering Shadows between the Dark and the Light

[Note: The following is the full text of an essay published in differences 25.1 (2014) as part of a special issue entitled In the Shadows of the Digital Humanities edited by Ellen Rooney and Elizabeth Weed. Duke UP’s publishing agreements allow authors to post the final version of their own work, but not using the publisher’s PDF. The essay as you see it here is thus a standard PDF distinct from that created by Duke UP. Subscribers, of course, can also read it in the press’s published form direct from the Duke UP site.

On Hypo-Real Models or Global Climate Change: A Challenge for the Humanities

We, the people, still believe that our obligations as Americans are not just to ourselves, but to all posterity. We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations. . . . Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires and crippling drought and more powerful storms. —President Barack Obama1

Marshall McLuhan: The First Cyberpunk Author?

Whenever I re-read Understanding Media, I am amazed by its brilliance and by its darkness – and by the fact that so little of the book, that many assume they already know because they have heard the aphorisms ‘the medium is the message’ and ‘the global village’, is actually known or understood (to use McLuhan’s phrase). To many, McLuhan is a prophet of the electronic age who predicted the importance of personal computers and the internet; to others, he is a doomed and dangerous apologist who, like his fictional counterpart in Videodrome, Dr O’Blivion, should have died from a TV induced tumor. Neither position catches the deep ambiguity – the hope and the fear – expressed in Understanding Media.Whenever I re-read Understanding Media, I am amazed by its brilliance and by its darkness – and by the fact that so little of the book, that many assume they already know because they have heard the aphorisms ‘the medium is the message’ and ‘the global village’, is actually known or understood (to use McLuhan’s phrase). To many, McLuhan is a prophet of the electronic age who predicted the importance of personal computers and the internet; to others, he is a doomed and dangerous apologist who, like his fictional counterpart in Videodrome, Dr O’Blivion, should have died from a TV induced tumor. Neither position catches the deep ambiguity – the hope and the fear – expressed in Understanding Media.